Hitting the Ceiling, Then Moving Up

Sia goes over the top almost immediately on her new album, “1000 Forms of Fear.” When the chorus of “Chandelier” arrives, a simulated orchestra crashes in, and her voice appears in a strenuous high register, belting, “I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, ” with an I-dare-myself upward leap on the last syllable of “chandelier.” Still aloft, she repeats “from the chandelier” and leaps even higher. It’s showy, impulsive, shrewd, gripping and maybe a little unhinged, and so is the rest of the album.

“1000 Forms of Fear” is the sixth studio album by Sia, whose last name is Furler. It follows a wild swerve in a songwriting career that she started in the late 1990s, recording emotionally exposed songs that wandered a broad spectrum from pop to experimentation, displaying an audaciously flexible voice. Sia became a star in her native Australia and drew an admiring audience worldwide. “Breathe Me,” from her 2004 album, “Colour the Small One,” accompanied the finale of the HBO series “Six Feet Under.”

But Sia grew miserable when touring and performing, turning to drugs and alcohol, and in 2011 she decided to work offstage instead as a songwriter, collaborating with producers and singers. She applied conscious strategies: having songs follow a path from what she has called “victim to victory” and building lyrics around a physical object as a metaphor (“Diamonds” with Rihanna, “Perfume” with Britney Spears). Suddenly, she was a consistent hit maker, newly allowing herself some clichés but also, surreptitiously, infusing the Top 10 with the angst and plot twists of her earlier songs.

On “1000 Forms of Fear,” Sia and the producer Greg Kurstin (who has also worked with Pink and Kelly Clarkson) put the full firepower of anthemic, radio-minded pop production behind lyrics that often see romance as a battle of life and death. The “victim to victory” formula still prevails, and there’s some self-esteem sloganeering that any of Sia’s songwriting clients could handle. “Big Girls Cry,” a march with distant echoes of Alanis Morissette’s “Hands Clean,” declares, “I don’t care if I don’t look pretty/Big girls cry when their hearts are breaking.”

Image

Sia manages to be formulaic and experimental at once.CreditFrederick M. Brown/Getty Images

But there are also stories of love akin to violence that make Sia sound like Lana Del Rey’s louder, rougher, stormier sister. “Straight for the Knife” and “Fair Game” are dirges with simulated string sections and lyrics like “I’m hungry for your bad loving,” and “Watch me squirm baby, but you’re just what I need.”

Sia is hardly the only one aiming messages like those toward the mass pop arena. She shares the pop-anthem format, and its sturdy four-chord crescendos, with both collaborators and possible competitors, many of whom — Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Alicia Keys, Katy Perry, Madonna — have recorded songs similar in form and message to those on “1000 Forms of Fear.”

So Sia and Mr. Kurstin have escalated sonically, pushing the music to hysterical extremes. “Free the Animal” — with verses about how she’ll attack her lover while her chorus taunts, “Detonate me, shoot me like a cannonball,” and “Decapitate me, hit me like a baseball” — percolates along on blipping, mutating electronics, which at one point give way to plinking Minimalistic xylophone. Sia’s voice, meanwhile, is digitally sliced into a quick-stuttering gurgle, and she breaks into a squeeze-toy squeak when she sings about “loving you to death.”

Throughout the album, her singing — both leads and backups — slurs and scrapes, catches and yowls, quavers and shouts. It’s not the triumphal, laminated, computer-perfected tone of Sia’s clients. It’s the sound of the loopy, unresolved passions that can still be alive within pop formulas. JON PARELES

MARY SARAH

“Bridges”

(144 Entertainment)

If country music rests on a bedrock of tradition, stoic against the buffeting tides of change, then there’s good cause for an album like “Bridges,” the likely breakout of a bright-eyed singer named Mary Sarah. On its face, it’s an all-star duets record, a country version of the sort of gambit we now expect from eminent elders, like Tony Bennett. But in an inversion of the natural order, it’s the old-timers who fill out the guest list, and the youngster who serves as a chipper constant.

Image

Ms. Sarah, who just turned 19, was born in Tulsa and raised in Houston, where she grew up singing in church and at regional Opry houses and eventually on tour with the voracious pop juggernaut known as Kidz Bop. Since releasing her 2010 debut album, “Crazy Good,” she moved to the Nashville area, where she has worked her way into the country fold, covering songs on YouTube and connecting with producers like Kent Wells, who diligently worked his contacts here.

Chief among them is Dolly Parton, whose gracious, agreeable duet with Ms. Sarah, keening “Jolene,” opens the album on a strong note. Falling into roughly the same category are the album’s sure, straightforward versions of “Rose Garden,” with Lynn Anderson; “Texas (When I Die),” with Tanya Tucker; and “Crazy,” with Willie Nelson.

These are, in case it isn’t clear, country hits (and country stars) of a vintage that predates Ms. Sarah by a generation or two. And as if to double down on her intentions, she also enlists Merle Haggard for “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” his gruff yawp of patriotism from the Vietnam era, which comes across under current conditions like a rebuke of ... who, exactly? Edward J. Snowden? Bill Maher? Kacey Musgraves, the country upstart whose youthful cynicism stands in opposition to Ms. Sarah’s purer exuberance?

The earnestness of Ms. Sarah’s presentation matches the sweet gloss of her voice, which has admirable color and control but still not much character. “Bridges” is at its deadliest when she goes full treacle, joining the Oak Ridge Boys (among her earliest endorsers) for “Dream On,” or Ronnie Milsap for “What a Difference You’ve Made in My Life.” And while it’s surely meaningful to Ms. Sarah to sing “Where the Boys Are,” the old Connie Francis hit, with Neil Sedaka, one of its writers, that doesn’t make it a good idea.

Maybe it’s the fact of Ms. Sarah’s youth that brings an appreciable pathos to some de facto elegies on the album, like “Heartaches by the Number,” which Ray Price recorded with Ms. Sarah not long before his death late last year. “All I Want to Do Is Sing My Song,” written by Mr. Haggard and Freddy Powers, is a salute to the latter, Ms. Sarah’s mentor, whose voice has been silenced by Parkinson’s disease. (His vocal part is spliced in from older recordings.) And “My Great Escape,” another of Mr. Powers’s songs, finds Ms. Sarah in the company of Big & Rich, paying homage on the proving ground. NATE CHINEN

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hitting the Ceiling, Then Moving Up. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe